‘Vice’ Almost Had a Dick Cheney Musical Number

Vice, the new movie about the life of former Vice President Dick Cheney from writer/director Adam McKay, is not your typical biopic. It has fantastical digressions that could come straight from a Monty Python episode. There’s a very unusual narrator and several times where the whole movie breaks the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience. According to one of the stars of the film, though, it was almost much stranger.

Steve Carell, who plays Donald Rumsfeld in Vice to Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney, told UPROXX that at one point in production the movie was intended to have a “big musical number” that ultimately got cut:

At one point there was a big musical number in the movie. And some of it works in the context of what he’s trying to achieve as a film and a story, and some of it doesn’t. I think in the editing process it becomes evident to him what stuff is playing, and what stuff isn’t.

Carell noted there was “a lot of weird stuff that didn’t end up in the movie” — which is too bad, because the best stuff in Vice is the weird stuff. When the movie just sort of shows you Cheney growing up, going to the White House, it doesn’t quite work. When McKay lets it rip, it suddenly becomes a much more interesting perspective on these events. Vice opens in theaters on Christmas Day.